The Full Helping Digs into Our Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookies

Let America’s Test Kitchen introduce you to a delicious world of interesting textures and fresh flavors that make cooking vegan accessible to all. We’ve published our first vegan cookbook, Vegan for Everybody, that suits the needs of everyone—whether you’re a strict vegan or not. In doing so, we developed recipes (with no animal products—period) that wowed us in terms of flavor and texture, showing that veganism isn’t about making sacrifices or substitutions, but about celebrating a new way to eat.

Gena from The Full Helping blog recently made the Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookies recipe from our Vegan for Everybodycookbook. The verdict? "It's good enough to become my go-to,” she writes. Those delicious vegan chocolate chip cookies she’s referring to come from our vegan cookbook, Vegan for Everybody.

When it came to developing a vegan chocolate chip cookie recipe, we weren’t willing to settle for anything less than perfection. The recipe had to produce a cookie that would be moist and chewy on the inside and crisp at the edges, with deep notes of toffee. It took us 79 batches, but we finally achieved a recipe that achieved our high expectations. (For more details on the discoveries that led to our final recipe, check out this behind-the-scenes interview with Anne Wolf, the test cook who developed it.)

I suspected I’d be a fan of America’s Test Kitchen’s Vegan for Everybody the moment I saw its title.

For toffee-like flavor and richness, our recipe uses brown sugar and almond butter, which proved to be a surprising yet worthy replacement for butter. And the trick to a chewy texture was to leave the dough alone. Letting the mixed dough rest for 1 to 4 hours gives the proteins and starches in the flour a jump start on breaking down; meanwhile, the sugar dissolves, hydrates, and later helps the cookie retain moisture better during baking.

Gena is a seasoned vegan cook who knows a good vegan recipe when she sees—or bakes—one. "When I saw that Vegan for Everybody includes a chocolate chip cookie recipe, I knew it was going to be a keeper," she writes. "And it is."

BOOKSTORE

Vegan for Everybody

Veganism is going mainstream. The benefits of consuming fewer animal products appear frequently in the news. But eating vegan can seem overwhelming: Will it be flavorful? Satisfying? Easy to make? In Vegan for Everybody, the test kitchen addresses head-on what gives people pause—finding great and filling vegan protein options, cooking without dairy, preparing different whole grains and vegetables, and even baking.

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